Challenges of the project

Challenging sampling
Challenging sampling in Loch Leven, Scotland (click to enlarge)

The first River Basin Management Plans, as the main pathway to assess and improve Europe’s waters, face several challenges:

  • The Programmes of Measures are often decoupled from ecological status assessment
  • Ecological status assessment does not distinguish the impacts of different stressors
  • The understanding of how multiple stressors affect degradation and restoration is poor
  • Tools to prioritise measures and to predict ecological status following restoration are required, but rarely available
  • Convincing arguments beyond the concept of ecological status are needed to raise public acceptance for the huge investments connected to River Basin Management and restoration

MARS will to address these gaps and will improve tools to assess ecological status and the measures to achieve good ecological status.